


conversing with strangers.

by captain_tots



Series: (provocateur; provocatrix) [1]
Category: James Bond (Craig movies), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Double Agents, F/M, Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-12
Updated: 2013-03-12
Packaged: 2017-12-05 01:43:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/717436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/captain_tots/pseuds/captain_tots
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eve has her finger on the trigger of the rifle, peering down the scope at the two men brawling on top of the train. She doesn't particularly want to shoot Bond, but with every passing second, it's looking like a more and more appealing option.</p>
            </blockquote>





	conversing with strangers.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kyrilu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kyrilu/gifts).



> For Kyrilu, who said in passing that someone should try Silva/Eve. I took it and ran with it, and here we are. SilvaPenny. Has a nice ring to it, hm?  
> I'm trying something new and publishing each installment of this story as an independent one-shot within a series.

**Manchester, England.**   
**December, 2000.**

  
This is not the way Eve Moneypenny expected to go out, face shoved into the dirty floor of an empty warehouse, choking on the taste of her own hot and acrid blood welling up inside her cheeks.

“Where's the rest of the cargo?”

A steel toed boot collides with the side of her face, scraping skin and bursting blood vessels right under the surface. Her tongue is thick, and her jaw is on fire; speaking takes all of her concentration.

“I... didn't take it. Marcus or Louis did...”

This is the truth, but the truth is not what these men want to hear, and the boot collides with her cheek once again.

“Marcus and Louis have been running for us for years. And you're telling me that they decided to steal product for the first time today, not you? Not the new bitch?”

“Yes,” Eve moans into the ground. She feels the weight of a man stepping down on her back. He'll break her in half with ease if he tries.

“Where. Is. The. Product.”

It's not even a question, but a death sentence.

“I didn't take it. I don't know. My backpack was full when I left.”

Above her, Eve hears the click of a switchblade.

“We're going to get our product back, if we have to cut your nose open and suck it back out.”

She feels the heat of a body leaning in close to her, hears the way the knife cuts through the stale air, and involuntarily tenses her muscles, too weak to fight, weighed down too heavily to run.

This is how it's going to end for her. This is not what is supposed to happen to good girls, the sort of girl she used to be: back before the accident, before foster care, before her stupid junkie “friends” and their money making schemes. And now she's going to end up as a blood splatter on the pavement of some abandoned building, one hell of a far cry from the student government president and violin prodigy they said she was.

Eve inhales as much oxygen as she can get through her swollen mouth and holds her breath. She waits for the searing pain of a knife through her back.

“How much cocaine did she steal?” 

There's a new voice in the room. It's thick, accented with a bit of Spanish, maybe? But there's an odd tinny quality to it, something a bit unnatural. Eve holds her breath still.

“Why?” the gangster who's holding her down asks. “Does it matter?”

“How much money do you intend on murdering this girl over?”

There's a lengthy silence. Eve is forced to breathe once again, and she shudders with the pain of cold air hitting her open wounds.

“Five thousand pounds.”

Eve hears the sound of someone rifling through their pockets, cloth bunching about. Then there's paper rubbing together, bills, perhaps?

But that's impossible. No guardian angel is out to save her sorry soul.

“Five thousand pounds, gentlemen.”

“What?” The other gangster who dragged her in here speaks this time. He's perplexed, as is Eve.

“ _What?_ Will it cost me more than five thousand pounds to prevent you from murdering a child, putting this entire operation at risk?”

“Nobody's gonna come looking for this bitch. Orphan, they said. Foster kid. No one's gonna miss her.”

“So that means she has a case worker, hm? A government employee paid to know of her whereabouts? Do you fail to see how this puts this operation in jeopardy?”

“You sure seem to be interested in us getting caught, Mr. Silva. Maybe there's something you're not telling us?”

There's the unmistakable sounds of a gun cocking, something she's heard in movies before, nothing she thought she'd encounter in real life. And then the mysterious stranger laughs, almost hysterically.

“Gentlemen, if you shoot me, you are more dull than I thought. Without me to recover it, your funds will remain laundered, and inaccessible to you. The most reasonable course of action would be for you to take my money and let the girl go, lest you put yourselves at risk for arrest.”

“How can we trust you to give us our money?” The gangsters are angry, she can hear it in their clipped voices.

“Do you have a choice?”

Eve could almost swear that the stranger laughed.

* * *

  
**Istanbul, Turkey**   
**June 2012**

Eve isn't even supposed to be in action for this particular mission; she prefers hanging out on the perimeter of the double-oh's wave of destruction, running surveillance and intelligence, but when two agents go down in short succession, reinforcements are required. And so she's barreling through the streets of Istanbul, with pale knuckles wrapped around a steering wheel—shes' never been the best driver, and the high stakes game she's playing doesn't do anything to help. Not when it's all coming to a swift and violent end.

Bond is at the safe house, which has become marginally less than safe within the past hour. Now it's the site of Agent Ronson's shooting, and the place where she needs to get the double-oh and deliver him to wherever it is Patrice is running off to.

Eve makes a dangerously sharp turn up to the building, and is relieved to see Bond already standing outside. She honks twice to catch his attention. She likes Bond, truthfully. He's a competent agent, easy on the eyes, gets his job done. It's just a pity that today he's going to have to interfere with her's.

Bond hops into the car and Eve speeds off immediately.

“You got him?” Bond asks.

“He's in the black Audi,” she replies.

Eve would know. It's one of his favorites.

“What about Ronson?” she asks of Bond. She won't be surprised to hear if he's dead—Patrice always was a nasty shot.

“He's been hit.” Bond grimaces and yells something at Tanner over his earpiece. Eve discerns that Ronson is dead.

She takes another tight and narrow corner too fast, and knocks one of the mirrors clean off. She hates driving this car, it's like trying to maneuver a manatee.

“That's alright,” Bond quips. “You weren't using it.”

She veers sharply to the side and knocks off the other mirror to match.

“Wasn't using that one either.”

Inevitably, the police take after them, and the entire affair turns into a disaster of toppled fruit carts and gunfire that leads to Bond jumping out of the car and onto a motorcycle—ever the show off he is. Eve follows suit best as she can in the unwieldy car, driving the opposite way through traffic with her heart pounding up in her throat. Bond somehow ends up riding a bike in pursuit of Patrice over the roofs of the Grand Bazaar. She supposes she shouldn't be too surprised.

Eve catches up with them at the train tracks, and watches in horror as Patrice jumps on top of a train, for Christ's sake, and Bond pursues him.

The entire event is a blur of madness and adrenaline, watching as Bond actually rips a train car open with a bulldozer, M chattering in her earpiece, demanding an explanation for what's going on, which is impossible. As she approaches the end of the road, Eve stops the car and grabs her rifle. Bond and Patrice are still fighting with no sign of a winner yet.

Eve has her finger on the trigger of the rifle, peering down the scope at the two men brawling on top of the train. She doesn't particularly want to shoot Bond, but with every passing second, it's looking like a more and more appealing option. There would be a mess of bureaucracy to wade through if a double-oh agent went down from friendly fire, but without intervention, Bond will make quick work of Patrice, strangle him to death with the hard drive that the idiot thought to hang around his neck, for God's sake, and then unceremoniously dump his body off the top of the train after rifling through the man's pockets. And God knows what sort of damning evidence the mercenary is carrying on him. It's bad enough that he uses those bloody stupid bullets that got the CIA on his ass. She wouldn't be surprised if he had the fucking coordinates of the island on his phone. Granted, no one honestly expected Bond to get this far— the whole bulldozer trick had been a wild card, to say the least—but here they were, Patrice and Bond perched on top of a train, M screeching in her ear, and a target on 007's heart.

M tells her to take the bloody shot.

Eve fires.

She watches with a sense of grim satisfaction as Bond stumbles back and plummets straight down. Killing people doesn't sit terribly well with her, but it's as much M's fault as it is her own. Patrice does a double take and then looks right at her. She's tempted to give him a middle finger salute for her trouble.

She's pretty sure that she can weasel her way out of being blamed for Bond's death by claiming that the angle of the shot was bad, M distracted her, friendly fire, and so on. Of course, there's going to be some form of consequence for her actions. And if she's suspended, or worse, fired outright, then they'll be at a serious disadvantage, to put it mildly...

She can hear labored breathing on the other end of her earpiece. She ought to say something.

“Agent down,” Eve chokes out, hoping that she sounds acceptably broken up about it, rather than anxious.

She hears M smack her hands down against something on the other end of the communicator. Serves the bitch right, Eve thinks, the ghost of a snide smile flickering over her lips. You can't treat people like they're expendable and then be shocked when you lose them.

Tanner calls in an evac for her; the car is suitably trashed from bullet holes. Eve sits with her legs crossed in the grass, peering down at the river below her. There's no way Bond survived the fall, not with at least one bullet in him. She feels a hint of guilt nagging at the corner of her mind, but shoves it away. It's M's fault, really.

She wouldn't have shot Bond otherwise.

(Would she?)

Eve shakes her head, an attempt to physically clear her mind. What's done is done, no use in rationalizing or theorizing. The important part is to make sure he knows what happened.

And to not get booted from MI6, if she can help it. He needs her there. 

She needs to talk to him, as soon as possible.

* * *

  
 **London, England**  
 **June, 2012**  
   

Eve Moneypenny has two cellphones and two laptops; a credit card with a false name that's never been uttered before, and a pistol with the serial number filed off. She lives in a one room flat in an expensive part of London, which MI6 foots the bill for, naturally. The walls are a tasteful robins egg blue, the furnishings are gleaming white. She hasn't decorated much: knickknacks are a luxury of those with jobs which don't leave them running from one corner of the world to the next within the span of a week, and those without secret lives, without traitorous ties to cyberterrorists.

She does not get booted from MI6—far from it. It's the old bitch that's getting sent on her way, something to do with leaving the identities of NATO agents on one laptop, without the permission of foreign governments. He told her once that the woman's pride would be her downfall. Seems he was right.

Eve takes a walk from her flat, two blocks to a crowded coffee shop. She brings the prepaid cellphone, the one without a name tied to it.

Sitting in the corner seat with every exit in sight, Eve dials a foreign number. The line rings three times. She hangs up.

Five minutes later, like clockwork, the phone buzzes.

“She has three months left in the department. Act quickly.”

There's a sharp intake of breath on the other end of the line. And then static.

The phone goes back into her pocket. She leaves a small tip at the counter in cash, and leaves without buying anything.  
\---


End file.
